A DEFENCE OF PENNY DREADFULS
G.K. Chesterton
(From "The Defendant" published in "The Wayfarer's Library"
by J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, London, 1901)
One of the strangest examples of the degree to which ordinary
life is undervalued is the example of popular literature,
the vast mass of which we contentedly describe as vulgar.
The boy's novelette may be ignorant in a literary sense,
which is only like saying that modern novel is ignorant in the
chemical sense, or the economic sense, or the astronomical sense;
but it is not vulgar intrinsically--it is the actual centre
of a million flaming imaginations.
In former centuries the educated class ignored the ruck
of vulgar literature. They ignored, and therefore did not,
properly speaking, despise it. Simple ignorance and indifference
does not inflate the character with pride. A man does not walk
down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at
the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes.
The old scholars left the whole under-world of popular compositions
in a similar darkness.
To-day, however, we have reversed this principle.
We do despise vulgar compositions, and we do not ignore them.
We are in some danger of becoming petty in our study of pettiness;
there is a terrible Circean law in the background that if the soul
stoops too ostentatiously to examine anything it never gets up again.
There is no class of vulgar publications about which there is,
to my mind, more utterly ridiculous exaggeration and misconception
than the current boys' literature of the lowest stratum.
This class of composition has presumably always existed, and must exist.
It has no more claim to be good literature than the daily conversation
of its readers to be fine oratory, or the lodging-houses and
tenements they inhabit to be sublime architecture. But people must
have conversation, they must have houses, and they must have stories.
The simple need for some kind of ideal world in which fictitious
persons play an unhampered part is infinitely deeper and older than
the rules of good art, and much more important. Every one of us
in childhood has constructed such an invisible dramatis personae,
but it never occurred to our nurses to correct the composition
by careful comparison with Balzac. In the East the professional
story-teller goes from village to village with a small carpet;
and I wish sincerely that any one had the moral courage to spread
that carpet and sit on it in Ludgate Circus. But it is not probable
that all the tales of the carpet-bearer are little gems of original
artistic workmanship. Literature and fiction are two entirely
different things. Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.
A work of art can hardly be too short, for its climax is its merit.
A story can never be too long, for its conclusion is merely
to be deplored, like the last halfpenny or the last pipelight.
And so, while the increase of the artistic conscience tends
in more ambitious works to brevity and impressionism, voluminous
industry still marks the producer of the true romantic trash.
There was no end to the ballads of Robin Hood; there is no end
to the volumes about Dick Deadshot and the Avenging Nine. These two
heroes are deliberately conceived as immortal.
But instead of basing all discussion of the problem upon
the common-sense recognition of this fact--that the youth
of the lower orders always has had and always must
have formless and endless romantic reading of some kind,
and then going on to make provision for its wholesomeness--
we begin, generally speaking, by fantastic abuse of this reading
as a whole and indignant surprise that the errand-boys under
discussion do not read The Egoist and The Master Builder. It is
the custom, particularly among magistrates, to attribute
half the crimes of the Metropolis to cheap novelettes.
If some grimy urchin runs away with an apple, the magistrate
shrewdly points out that the child's knowledge that apples
appease hunger is traceable to some curious literary researches.
The boys themselves, when penitent, frequently accuse the
novelettes with great bitterness, which is only to be expected
from young people possessed of no little native humour.
If I had forged a will, and could obtain sympathy by tracing
the incident to the influence of Mr. George Moore's novels,
I should find the greatest entertainment in the diversion.
At any rate, it is firmly fixed in the minds of most people
that gutter-boys, unlike everybody else in the community,
find their principal motives for conduct in printed books.
Now it is quite clear that this objection, the objection
brought by magistrates, has nothing to do with literary merit.
Bad story writing is not a crime. Mr. Hall Caine walks the
streets openly, and cannot be put in prison for an anticlimax.
The objection rests upon the theory that the tone of the mass
of boys' novelettes is criminal and degraded, appealing to low
cupidity and low cruelty. This is the magisterial theory,
and this is rubbish.
So far as I have seen them, in connection with the dirtiest
book-stalls in the poorest districts, the facts are simply these:
the whole bewildering mass of vulgar juvenile literature is
concerned with adventures, rambling, disconnected, and endless.
It does not express any passion of any sort, for there is no human
character of any sort. It runs eternally in certain grooves
of local and historical type: the medieval knight, the eighteenth
century duellist, and the modern cowboy recur with the same stiff
simplicity as the conventional human figures in an Oriental pattern.
I can quite as easily imagine a human being kindling wild appetites
by the contemplation of his Turkey carpet as by such dehumanised
and naked narrative as this.
Among these stories there are a certain number which deal
sympathetically with the adventures of robbers, outlaws, and pirates,
which present in a dignified and romantic light thieves and murderers
like Dick Turpin and Claude Duval. That is to say, they do precisely
the same thing as Scott's Ivanhoe, Scott's Rob Roy, Scott's Lady
of the Lake, Byron's Corsair, Wordsworth's Rob Roy's Grave,
Stevenson's Macaire, Mr. Max Pemberton's Iron Pirate, and a thousand
more works distributed systematically as prizes and Christmas presents.
Nobody imagines that an admiration of Locksley in Ivanhoe will
lead a boy to shoot Japanese arrows at the deer in Richmond Park;
no one thinks that the incautious opening of Wordsworth at
the poem on Rob Roy will set him up for life as a blackmailer.
In the case of our own class, we recognise that this wild life
is contemplated with pleasure by the young, not because it
is like their own life, but because it is different from it.
It might at least cross our minds that, for what ever other reason
the errand-boy reads The Red Revenge, it really is not because
he is dripping with the gore of his own friends and relatives.
In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely
by speaking of the "lower classes" when we mean humanity minus ourselves.
This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is
simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.
He says, with a modest swagger, "I have invited twenty-five factory hands
to tea." If he said, "I have invited twenty five chartered accountants
to tea," every one would see the humour of so simple a classification.
but this is what we have done with this lumberland of foolish writing:
we have probed, as if it were some monstrous new disease, what is,
in fact, nothing but the foolish and valiant heart of man.
Ordinary men will always be sentimentalists: for a sentimentalist
is simply a man who has feelings and does not trouble to invent
a new way of expressing them. These common and current publications
have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine
and heroic truisms on which civilisation is built; for it is clear
that unless civilisation is built on truisms, it is not built at all.
Clearly, there could be no safety for a society in which the remark
by the Chief Justice that murder was wrong was regarded as an original
and dazzling epigram.
If the authors and publishers of Dick Deadshot, and such remarkable
works, were suddenly to make a raid upon the educated class,
were to take down the names of every man, however distinguished,
who was caught at a University Extension Lecture, were to
confiscate all our novels and warn us all to correct our lives,
we should he seriously annoyed. Yet they have far more right
to do so than we; for they, with all their idiocy, are normal
and we are abnormal. It is the modern literature of the educated,
not of the uneducated, which is avowedly and aggressively criminal.
Books recommending profligacy and pessimism, at which the high-souled
errand-boy would shudder, lie upon all our drawing-room tables.
If the dirtiest old owner of the dirtiest old book stall
in Whitechapel dared to display works really recommending
polygamy or suicide, his stock would be seized by the police.
These things are our luxuries. And with a hypocrisy so ludicrous
as to be almost unparalleled in history, we rate the gutter-boys
for their immorality at the very time that we are discussing
(with equivocal German professors) whether morality is valid at all.
At the very instant that we curse the Penny Dreadful for
encouraging thefts upon property, we canvass the proposition
that all property is theft. At the very instant we accuse it
(quite unjustly) of lubricity and indecency, we are cheerfully
reading philosophies which glory in lubricity and indecency.
At the very instant that we charge it with encouraging the young
to destroy life, we are placidly discussing whether life
is worth preserving.
But it is we who are the morbid exceptions; it is we who are
the criminal class. This should be our great comfort.
The vast mass of humanity, with their vast mass of idle books
and idle words, have never doubted and never will doubt that
courage is splendid, that fidelity is noble, that distressed
ladies should be rescued, and vanquished enemies spared.
There are a large number of cultivated persons who doubt
these maxims of daily life, just as there are a large number
of persons who believe they are the Prince of Wales; and I am told
that both classes of people are entertaining conversationalists.
But the average man or boy writes daily in these great gaudy
diaries of his soul, which we call Penny Dreadfuls, a plainer
and better gospel than any of those iridescent ethical paradoxes
that the fashionable change as often as their bonnets.
It may be a very limited aim in morality to shoot a "many faced
and fickle traitor," but at least it is a better aim than to be
a many faced and fickle traitor, which is a simple summary
of a good many modern systems from Mr. d'Annunzio's downwards.
So long as the coarse and thin texture of mere current
popular romance is not touched by a paltry culture it will
never be vitally immoral. It is always on the side of life.
The poor--the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life--
have often been mad, scatter-brained, and cruel, but never hopeless.
That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature
will always be a "blood and thunder" literature, as simple
as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.
[Scanned by Georges Allaire (gall@globetrotter.net)]